Feature

Joanna Coles on the Launch of CosmoBody

By Abigail Alderman, Hearst CorporationPublished on 07.21.14

Share This Page

For decades, Cosmopolitan has been committed to empowering young women to be their best selves with advice on relationships, career, beauty and health. On July 15,Cosmo, along with Hearst Digital Studios, expanded that commitment with the introduction of CosmoBody, a premium subscription video on-demand channel featuring fitness and lifestyle content. In part two of a four-part series, Cosmopolitan Editor in Chief Joanna Coles shares details about the new program, working with the Digital Studios and other Cosmo content extensions.

How did the idea for CosmoBody come about? What is Cosmo’s relationship with Hearst Digital Studios?

Joanna Coles: CosmoBody is a revolutionary new approach to fitness and exercise. Some of our most popular pages in the magazine are fitness related, so we know that young women are seeking more of this type of content. When Hearst Entertainment & Syndication Co-President and Hearst Digital Studios President Neeraj Khemlani was first exploring a trial premium subscription video on-demand service, we told him about the success of our fitness pages and our readers’ desire for more exercise content—it felt like the perfect fit. It was an organic idea that the Digital Studios has the design and creative resources to make really exceptional.

Cosmopolitan Editor in Chief Joanna Coles

The Digital Studios has been working closely with our editorial team, particularly our Senior Health and Fitness Editor Liz Plosser, who has been involved every step of the way. We’re fantastically lucky to have so many Hearst resources at our fingertips. We have camera crews, a studio and a huge beautiful gym with a big yoga studio. We’ve been shooting all around Manhattan and Los Angeles in some really fabulous locations. All of the content is very high quality—Neeraj was the executive producer of 60 Minutes, so he approaches the production with a very well-trained eye. It’s beautifully done.

Can you tell me about Liz Plosser and her role in CosmoBody?

Coles: Liz is responsible for the health and fitness content we feature in the magazine each month, and she’s also a certified fitness trainer. She’s a very smart woman who is incredibly interested in the quickest way to exercise; she has two young children and she understands the difficulties of squeezing fitness into your life. Liz recognizes that for many women, exercise is the first thing to go when you have a busy life. If you plan to go out to the gym after work and then someone calls you to go out for a drink, certainly going out for a drink sounds like much more fun! Liz has helped the Digital Studios develop ways to make this program flexible and applicable to the lives of young women.

What about Cosmo as a brand makes a subscription video channel a strong fit?

Coles: Our readers are very interested in looking fabulous and feeling sexy and confident. Fitness is a very important part of achieving that goal. The workouts are developed with the Cosmo brand in mind, including the best workout for a hangover and a workout to feel “Sexy by Saturday” because you’ve got a hot date.

Our audience is made up of young women with busy work and social lives—CosmoBody is built to work on the go so users can access the workouts and lifestyle content on their iOS and Android devices from any location. If someone is frequently staying in hotels when they travel for work, like I do, this program will be really helpful. CosmoBody is like having TV on-demand—it’s sort of the equivalent of House of Cards, but for fitness and lifestyle!

The most important element to this program is that it’s built by an editorial team. There are many brands out there that have fitness content, but it’s typically compiled by marketers. CosmoBody has a different body and soul because Liz and the Cosmo team are passionate about these topics. We want CosmoBody users to have the healthiest life possible and that’s what motivates this program. It is also an unbelievably good deal with a variety of fantastic trainers for only $9.95 a month. There is new content every day, from relentless workouts, to life changing advice and stories. I honestly think it’s going to revolutionize the way women feel about fitness.

How was the editorial team involved in the conceptualization of CosmoBody?

Coles: Our team has been involved in the conceptualization right from the very beginning. All of the CosmoBody trainers have a history of working with the magazine and Liz felt they were all people with something extra to bring to the table. For example, Jennifer Johnson has hilarious workouts, including an amazing workout in high heels. This program is not for people who bounce around in lycra and already have the body of a trainer, it’s for people who’ve got 10 minutes at their desk or 20 minutes when they get home from work before they’re meeting friends for drinks.

CosmoBody presents a large variety of fitness options because we have very different trainers who all provide exciting and unique personalities and exercises. The idea is for the trainers to become like your friends—they tell you their stories, the right tricks that they use, what they eat, how to recover from a setback. The whole approach is very holistic because it’s not just about moving your leg to the right 15 times; it’s much more about the reason for exercising, how you’ll feel afterwards and the results you’ll see tomorrow.

We’re going to try and get as many people as possible involved in sharing content. When we have celebrities come in to the office, we’ll ask them to contribute their health and fitness tips, and I’m sure we’re also going to get a lot of great ideas from our audience.

Are there plans to develop other Cosmo-centric video services with the Digital Studios?

Coles: Yes, we’d definitely like to explore this option. There is really nothing like this in the marketplace and certainly not of this quality and variety. No other magazine is in this space, and Liz’s brilliance combined with Neeraj’s brilliance is so much greater than the sum of their parts. I would be very surprised if this wasn’t a blueprint for more Cosmo programs.

Can you tell me more about other Cosmo brand extensions in the works?

Coles: We’re doing our first Cosmo Fun Fearless Life conference at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center in November and one in Miami later in the year. I’m extremely excited about this program—we have a fantastic lineup of speakers including Cameron Diaz, Spanx Founder Sara Blakely, The Honest Company’s Jessica Alba, Nasty Gal’s Sophia Amoruso and Harvard Business School’s Amy Cuddy (who has the most-watched TED Talk).

We have a fantastic collection of really impressive women who will provide the attendees, mostly young women in their 20s, with an inspirational crash course on life. Jason Silva from Brain Games will be talking about how to boost your brain, there will be a beauty bar sponsored by Maybelline and Express, tutorials on selecting the best interview clothing and a whole variety of life-enhancing sessions.

For brands like Cosmopolitan, having access to the ever-expanding world of technology is exciting because while we love the printed page, there’s a lot we can’t do with it. Extensions like our conferences and CosmoBody are ways of being with the consumer where they really are—for us it’s like finding a third dimension in which we can produce content and really be a part of their lives. Cosmo is one of those brands that readers love, in part because they’re reading it at the time of many "firsts." I think we have a lot of room to develop all sorts of editorial programming and it’s going to make a big difference for young women.